Ukrainian Neighbourhood Loses Landmark

By Brigitte Noël

The Ukrainian community in Toronto’s Bloor West Village is about to lose a major cultural landmark.

Plast Toronto will move out of the Bloor Street location it has occupied for more than 50 years. While the popular Ukrainian youth scouting organization is simply relocating further west to The Kingsway, its departure represents a bigger phenomenon in the once-thriving Eastern European district.

“It will take away a certain quality to the area,” says former Bloor West Village resident Myron Pyzyk. A second-generation Ukrainian from Edmonton, Pyzyk moved to Toronto’s west end in 1982. He jokes that the choice of a neighbourhood with an Eastern European character “may have been genetic.” In 1989, Pyzyk traded his city life for a suburban home. “The choice became to renovate or move,” he says of his decision. His son’s involvement with Plast, the Ukrainian equivalent of Scouts Canada, gave the family a pretext for weekly trips back to the neighbourhood. “When I moved to Mississauga, I missed Bloor West Village. I went through withdrawal.”

Pyzyk is adamant that Plast has shaped Bloor West Village’s Eastern European character by contributing to the conservation of Ukrainian language and culture.

Pyzyk acknowledges the neighbourhood has changed tremendously in the last two decades, with many family-owned Ukrainian businesses replaced by higher-end stores and chains.

“It’s becoming more gentrified,” agrees Andrij Makuch, research coordinator for the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. The residential demographic is also shifting. Makuch says the neighbourhood’s first Ukrainian residents are aging and moving into smaller dwellings or retirement homes. While some first and second generation Ukrainian immigrants are still moving into the neighbourhood, he says that younger families like Pyzyk’s are looking to Mississauga and Etobicoke in search of more space.

A recent study by planning experts Mohammad Qadeer, Sandeep Agrawal and Alexander Lovell, titled “Evolution of Ethnic Enclaves in the Toronto Metropolitan Area,” shows that while the city’s Asian neighbourhoods are expanding, many European areas are dissolving, albeit never completely. A decrease in European immigration and an increasingly expensive housing market in the downtown area are key factors, along with the apparent ease and appeal of suburban living. Makuch predicts that small Ukrainian communities are unlikely to crystallize in the suburbs: “Physically, you couldn’t reproduce that same kind of enclave that you have here,” he says of Bloor West Village.

Bloor West Village is not Toronto’s first Ukrainian community – the area only began to develop as an Eastern European neighbourhood roughly 50 years ago. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, Ukrainian immigrants were concentrated downtown near Yonge and Queen Streets and in the area now known as The Junction.

After the First World War, the community relocated to Queen and Bathurst Streets and that region became the city’s main Ukrainian quarter. As immigrant families grew, the need for space brought them into Bloor West Village in the 1950s and ’60s.

Since then, important Ukrainian landmarks popped up along Bloor between High Park and Jane Street. Along with the bakeries, delicatessens and credit unions, Bloor West Village is home to institutions such as the Canadian Ukrainian Art Foundation (KUMF), the Ukrainian Canadian Social Services and host to the annual Toronto Ukrainian Festival. The Plast centre has been at the corner of Kennedy Avenue and Bloor Street West since 1956 and welcomes close to 1,000 members between ages six and 102. However, Plast is not the first cultural establishment to leave the area this year. In March, the Consulate General of Ukraine in Toronto uprooted its Bloor West Village office and moved to a new location on Lakeshore Boulevard West.

Olga Hul, Plast Toronto’s administrator, says the organization’s new site is a beautiful building, donated by Plast members Erast and Yarmila Huculak. However, she says that the move will be a sad one. “It’s convenient,” she says of the centre’s current spot. For the time being, members are using both buildings and meetings are alternating between locations.

For Alexander Chumak, a social worker at the Ukrainian Canadian Social Services and former school trustee, the preservation of the Ukrainian community now lies in the strengthening of social ties. With Plast leaving, he highlights a pressing need to address the disparities that exist among different Ukrainian groups.

There’s a difference in ideology between the waves of immigrants,” says Chumak. He says many Ukrainian cultural groups and events revolve around nationalist pride, which mostly appeals to earlier immigrants. “mperialism doesn’t mean anything to (recent immigrants), they speak Russian and that’s normal,” he says. This is somewhat contentious for n earlier wave of immigrants, who came to Canada seeking refuge from Russian oppression. Chumak believes that a failure to address these differences is impeding the growth of a cohesive Ukrainian-Canadian community.

“The leaders have to start trying to understand each other, to see what the differences, the similarities are,” says Chumak. Makuch confirms that in the absence of a geographic community, there is a need to emphasize the importance of events-based and kinship networks.

Plast leaders have yet to confirm their moving date.

Brigitte Nol is a Master of Journalism student at Ryerson University in Toronto.